The Mega Stack “O” Jam concluded on August 21st at 11:59 PM Eastern. After checking eligibility for the following week, judging took place in September, and the finalists were announced on October 9th during Inside Unreal, earlier than the notification timeline listed in the official rules.
As for the judging, we have built a robust rubric that dives into the specifics of each criteria, and we have multiple judges within the industry, including those internal to Epic. Scores have historically not been released across challenges and jams hosted by Epic Games.
As it stands, the status of the Mega Stack “O” Jam is that it is in prize fulfilment.
Yeah, the MegaJam evaluation team decided that the best representation of creative visual elements on the game engine used by NATO, NASA and many game studios is… this game.
I’m going to highlight a few games that were completely ignored undeservingly. There are dozens more like them! To be hosent I don’t know whats wrong with the MegaJam evaluation team
I’m also confused with certain projects winning certain awards, since I remember playing games that to me looked, sounded and played better than the winners. I don’t mean to shame anyone. I think all the winners did amazing job and I’m sure the judges tried to score everything fairly, but here’s a bit of hopefully constructive feedback.
I’m aware the rules say that the judging scores for the criteria will not be reveled, but I hope this will be changed in future game jams. Not only would it bring more transparency into the judging process, but it would also help contestants see in which areas do they need to improve the most. If there’s a “public shaming“ concern, it could be an opt in checkbox in the submission form.
I would also welcome more detailed judging criteria for the modifier categories. For example the RTX on the description says “For the best game that harnesses NvRTX“ (while the itch.io page also specifies you have to include at least 1 RTX feature), it doesn’t specify if that’s the only thing that’s scored. The game that won the first place in this category had literally no audio. Does that mean the audio in this category wasn’t scored? If that’s the case it would be nice to know that ahead of time. If it was scored, is the game visually and gameplay-wise so much superior to the other ones that it deserved the win anyways? Here are the videos, and I recommend you playing the games as well, so you can decide for yourself.
For transparency, the 3rd place submission was my game. That’s why I’ve noticed this in this category, but It’s possible similar questions arise in others. And yes, I’m obviously biased towards my project, but I don’t mean to complain for complaining sake. I want to give a bit of constructive criticism, which I hope will make the future game jams better. Even if I knew the audio isn’t rated in this category, I would still spend hours making custom SFX and writing music, because I believe it makes the game experience better overall.
Huge congrats to all the winners, and thanks to Epic for hosting the game jam!
540 teams made a game. Waited for 5 months. And we have this 1 hour stream with really questionable decision and also a lot of categories were missed (houdini, soundtrack and so on). We understand that GameJams is not main scope of Epic. But this is a bit frustrating TBH.
I agree with everyone above. The choices for winners were highly questionable. Almost like they didn’t play all of the games. One of the winners clearly used the default grid material which was explicitly disallowed.
The stream quality was absolutely awful. Some of the showcases were at ~20fps or lower. One of the mentioned games had gameplay on screen for less than one second. How can this be so unorganized when there was 5 months to get it right?
I also agree that the judging should have been transparent. The normal process for jams is community driven judging. I actually think the community would have picked much better than any of the judges did. Even when jams are judged by a specific panel, they show themselves playing the games, or give feedback to prove the submission was played. One judge did not play 500 games so the judging was unfair. It would appear to me that some judges would have no comparison for a good game vs a bad submission if they only played a handful of games to compare. If I only played bad submissions I would rate a decent game highly but the opposite can also be true. If my baseline is awful submissions then the games I end up sending up as good may not actually compete with some of the other submissions. Then another judge that has arguably played the best games in the jam but can only pick 25% of their lot forces them to leave out games that actually were better than the other judges 25%. I assume this is exactly what happened. There were many, many games submitted that were great lengths better than some of the winners but somehow missed being highlighted.
I anticipate there will be no changes beyond reducing it from 5 months turn around. And I also think our feedback here will never matter, even if some community manager says otherwise. It’s corporate cope. They did the same thing saying vbucks weren’t going to increase in price from the leak. And then turned around and did exactly what they said wasn’t true. As such, I will not participate in any further jams ran by Epic. I hope other creators will show our disdain for the indifference by also refusing to participate in the next jam. We deserve better.
I did not participate in this jam (but was interested) and it really seems like there are some serious issues with how Epic has handled it.
Based on the participant feedback that I gathered, here are the main concerns:
5 months is too long to wait for the winners update
Epic should hire more judges, or ask for volunteers
Does not respect the developers time and effort to participate
The grading matrix needs to be more transparent and detailed
There was alot confusion about how winners were selected. Examples of winners included:
Not being disqualified for using Default Grid material (as stated in the rules)
Having no audio in game. Assuming that having no audio would score 0/5 for that category.. So, even if they received 5/5 for the other 5 categories, the max score could be around 83%, which seems statistically improbable to be a first prize winner
Objectively average looking entry winning best “creative use of visual elements” prize when other entries had stronger art style
There should be a limit of 1 prize per entry
One game winning 3 prizes is not fair
Community feedback doesn’t matter
Valid concerns from the community have not been addressed by Epic, instead we get canned styled PR responses.
Not a single entry in the top 15 community’s choice was selected as a winner.
Meaning, there is a massive disconnect between the winners Epic chose, and what the community thought was best. What is the justification for that?
We have heard they are expert judges, but no one seems to agree with that statement.
Congratulations to all the participants and winners and thanks for the announcement Livestream it was great to watch and the whole jam was a great experience as this was my first ever game jam. I was one of the winners.
Have the winners be contacted yet?
Based on the official rules the winners are contacted before the final announcement but i dont see any email. To be more specific i won the Army of One Category.
Update
I have received the email asking for more information so epic games can process the prize fulfillment. To confirm ,email with @xa.epicgames.com domain is the correct email ? Can we get a confirmation on this . Thank you .
Yeah same thing for the stack o jam that was a bit before this jam, it was a long time of radio silence then the winners just seemed randomly chosen. Another thing that was weird is that they talked about judging criteria and points, but when every other game jam on itch.io shows your score in the categories afterwards, we were unable to get any results of any kind. It’s weird because with the amount of money in the prizes participants are going to take these jams very seriously but it does not seem like epic does or the employees that don’t have enough time to actually run the jam. Done many jams and never done with so little communication and transparency which is strange for such a big company.
I wanted to thank everyone for their feedback on the 2025 Epic MegaJam. We’re looking at it all, compiling it for a review of the event, the issues it faced, and how we can do better in the future.
Also, as a note, the Digital Brush Mastery winner, Kronos, was not for the “best visual elements”; it was for the “best hand-drawn visual elements”, meaning the criteria was to hand-draw art/elements and incorporate those into the game. In addition, some of the sponsored categories are chosen in consideration of the sponsor’s choices as well.
Direct quote of Dan Hutnik, the announcer of winners: “So another-another win for Kronos here! This is for the best game showcased the creative use of visual elements“, then he emphasized the idea of 2D in 3D world and how it’s creative to switch between 2D and 3D. He didn’t say it was for the “best hand-drawn visual elements”.
So not only the Epic team didn’t provide proper feedback and ignored dozens of awesome games, the announcer of winners couldn’t properly announce the winner. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure five months is enough time to prepare for that.
Also important feedback from other speekers is still being overlooked.
Thank you for the confirmation , hope my reply came through and looking forward to more GameJams . Is there any ETA/Estimates on how long the whole process can take for the prize fulfillment ?
No clarification on a game winning that was obviously disqualified for having the default material? These are the types of oversights that make us think the winners were not chosen correctly.
